Few can have been unmoved by the desperately sad case of Alfie Evans, who died yesterday after the courts overruled his parents' wishes and allowed Alder Hey hospital to withdraw life support. Alfie's brain was terribly damaged by an undiagnosed degenerative neural condition. He could not survive without the life support. His parents are young, barely a few years out of childhood themselves. The grief that all of us watching felt as events moved inexorably towards their inevitable end can have been nothing to the trauma they have experienced.
We've surely all experienced unacceptable death in one form or another, and so everyone must have had grounds to empathise with their pain. In my own past there have been many deaths that were unimaginably difficult to deal with – suicide, miscarriage, even murder of one of my childhood friends by a relative of hers after she returned home from Brownies, where just a few hours earlier we had been earning badges and trying to be good for Brown Owl.
I'll just mention one episode in a little more detail. My mother had a passion for horses, specifically for Welsh ponies. We had a little herd of our own, and she used to breed them. Those of her many children who liked riding would 'break' or train and sell the youngsters. Off they then cantered to do well in the local pony club or out with the Meynell hunt. Riding and owning horses in those days was barely regulated. There were few of the expensive accessories there are now and, if you had a vicarage with lots of historic parish lands attached, pretty cheap. Breeding and selling ponies could even turn a small profit.
Then we were hit by disaster. One after another, a group of ponies that grazed in one particular field caught 'grass sickness'. Their bowels stopped functioning, and they moved towards slow and incredibly painful death. After the first one could not be cured, the rest were 'put down' when they showed signs of the illness. Like everyone did then, we 'recycled' horses that died good and natural deaths by sending their carcasses to the hunt kennels. But these were not good deaths. They served no useful part of the cycle of life. We couldn't even do that.
The shock visited upon us children by the horrible deaths of these much loved pets was and still is almost indescribable. As the first pony bloated and bloated out, and stood in silent misery in her stable, I remember spending hours on my knees in my father's little Georgian church, St Mary's, praying God to save her life. I would do anything to make her better. I've never prayed harder for anything, before or since.
It was a very hard lesson. The vet could not save her. Could God?
After they were all put down, it was over. As a family we moved on. We never sat down and talked about it, not these or any other subsequent traumatic deaths, whether of pets or people. In fact the only deaths we actually ever discussed were the road kills that none living in the country can avoid. Even that was never serious, though, but jocular, a way of ensuring the dead birds and rabbits did not end up on our dinner plates.
I cannot bear to imagine the death of a child, though one of the deaths my parents later had to deal with was the suicide of their only son.
One particularly distressing aspect of the life and death of Alfie Evans was watching it play out on social media, in particular Twitter. At one stage, it seemed as if almost every tweet was an angry accusation of murder or euthanasia against the NHS. That some of these accusations appeared to be levelled in the name of Christian witness was physically sickening. Not in my name, I thought, while at the same time thought itself was paralysed by fear of entering the melee amid these extremes. People with friends in Liverpool spoke of how nurses and other health workers were actually frightened to go out into the streets. How could this be in any way acceptable? This is certainly among the many things that we as a society need to talk about now.
Alfie's father's heartbreaking description at the end of his finally growing his angel's wings was deeply piquant and had the sense of some transcendent truth. As we argued in The Tablet last week, what actual harm to the public good would have been done if Charlie Gard had been taken abroad last year, or if Alfie Evans had gone to the specialist hospital in Rome that offered to care for him?
Besides the doctors and nurses, the one person to emerge with great integrity is Alfie himself. The new 'Alfie's Law' that is now being advocated, to give more rights to parents in deciding how their children are treated in these and other difficult situations, might be something worthwhile that can come from all this.
Ruth Gledhill is multi-media editor of The Tablet and an editorial adviser to Christian Today. Find her on Twitter @ruthiegledhill
